The man who played the beloved sitcom character Chandler Bing, Matthew Perry, went head-to-head on Monday's Newsnight with the man who plays maligned pantomime villain Peter Hitchens. They were discussing drug courts, where former addicts sit as lay magistrates handling abuse-related crimes.

The Huffington Post called it a "classic row". The Independent said it was "a moment Friends fans probably never thought they'd see". Actually, if they'd thought about it, they'd probably have realised that Perry and Hitchens leading the national debate on drugs policy is the logical conclusion to most of the UK media's reporting of anything medical or scientific; an end-of-days scenario that could only be improved if Matt Le Blanc stepped in for Perry, in character as sandwich-loving ladies' man Joey Tribbiani.

Why, in a debate about addiction and how to treat it, was there no one from the medical profession present? The social worker Baroness Meacher, chair of the UK all-party parliamentary group on drug policy reform, was the third person on the panel, but she was reduced to backing up Perry, like a parent patting their child on the head and saying, "yes, well done, that's right".

Broadly speaking, the Hitchens and Perry debate was a discussion between a stern advocate of control and punishment (Hitchens) and a fully paid-up advocate of the Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy (Perry), which calls for addicts to stay away from their poison of choice and sees addiction as a disease that needs to be treated rather than a failing that needs to be beaten out of you with a good hard dose of prison.

Perry repeated the AA mantra that being addicted to something means that you are "allergic" to it. Hitchens disagreed. Both vaguely referred to research, but neither offered any specifics. Perry talked about the American Medical Association's 1976 classification of addiction as a disease as if it was an insurmountable argument that backed up everything he was saying. His reverence of this higher power only underlined what this discussion was lacking: a knowledgeable, authoritative voice from the medical or scientific side of the debate.

Hitchens was right when he said that doctors were not infallible and that a medical association might have got something wrong. But he still just offered an argument that contradicted itself, by saying that people like and enjoy taking drugs but that the best way of stopping those people becoming addicts was preventing them from ever taking them. His first assertion is right – people do like taking drugs. They always have and they always will so you can't prevent them from doing them. The question – the one that was supposedly being discussed – is then how you deal with addiction.

This debate has many sides and it is fine if two of those sides are represented by a journalist campaigner and an actor addict, but while everyone on the panel talked about the "serious nature" of the subject, their presence as the only participants undermined it. In a Guardian piece earlier this year, Martin Robbins pointed out that since the last general election, 14 comedians have appeared on the BBC's Question Time and only two scientists. Russell Brand is a state-sanctioned Perry, having appeared before the home affairs select committee to talk about drugs.

Politicians are constantly ignoring the advice of scientists but the media is just as guilty. Oppositional news coverage means that what producers deem most entertaining is throwing a few people with opposing views into a room and getting them to go at each other. They are right in a sense – this is entertaining – but when they also seek to dress these debates up as vital and intellectual, they're lying to themselves and they're lying to us. They tell us they are exploring the hard current affairs issues of the day, but they may as well be writing "44 Reasons Why You're Chandler Bing".